Social Search Result Rankings for Top 500 Tech Writers [Study]

The discussion around the increased emphasis of Google+ in the SERPs has as well brought with it some controversy around other social networks in the SERPs, and questions as to what Google does and doesn’t have crawler access to.

To get a better sense of how Google treats all social networks in the SERPs for personal brand queries, we analyzed the search rankings for Robert Scoble’s 500 most influential innovation blog writers. And, let’s be honest, we were as well curious to see how social networks appear in the SERPs for a group of then-known writers in the tech community.

For those not familiar with Robert Scoble, he is the Startup Liaison Officer at hosting and cloud computing provider, Rackspace. His job entails closely following the startup tech industry, as he has vociferously done - since his time as a blogger and at the time as Microsoft’s Innovation Evangelist from 2003-2006. Scoble is widely considered to be an authoritative voice in the research industry and source for all the goings-on in the startup world.

First, using the tech blogger names as keywords, we measured the appearance of social networks in the search results. We looked at the following social networks:

Our analysis showed Twitter held prime visibility positions for our group with 6 out of 10 of Twitter’s page one showings were prime visibility positions, the most of any of the social networks analyzed.

When it came to Google+, during we can't say for certain what percentage of the group did or didn't have a Google+ account, Google’s fledgling social network appeared on Page 1 for one-third of writers analyzed, but only 5 percent of those appearances were in position 1-3.

(Our data was collected as a ‘logged out Google user’. Searchers who are logged-in may see different results tailored to their own social networks, nevertheless based on industry reports of visits that are ‘[not provided]’, ~75 percent of users are for all that surfing the web during logged out).

Interestingly, and maybe surprisingly, during not a pure social network, question-answer site Quora had more Page 1 appearances than Google+ and far more of their appearances were in position 1-3. During 52 percent of authors had a Facebook result on Page 1, only a slightly greater percentage than Google+ were in position 1-3.

The equation

When we remove social networks from the equation and analyze the tech writers’ appearances in the top five search positions, no one site or group of sites dominated the search results: there was no site that appeared in the top five positions more than 10 percent of the time.

If our sample group of today’s top tech writers is any indication, Twitter and LinkedIn are the social networks grabbing the most visibility in the SERPs when it comes to personal brand queries – both in terms of Page 1 appearances and in terms of top visibility positions on the page.

While we don’t know for certain what percentage of our group have signed up for a Google+ account, the data suggests that for non-logged-in users, Google+ results aren't dominating the SERPs for personal brand queries, both in terms of frequency and position on Page 1. It will be interesting to see if, over time, other social networks just as Google+ and the white-hot Pinterest become increasingly visible for personal brand searches in the SERPs.